Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.
Although it can now be seen that 1941 – with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December – sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.
Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East – the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong and then Singapore, the retreat through Burma and the Japanese threat to Australia. One evening in the spring of 1942 when I had gone for a walk with my father I turned and asked him when – and how – it would all end. He replied very calmly: ‘We don’t know how, we don’t know when; but we have no doubt that we shall win.’
In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was a blow. If I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third-year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.
* Theosophy was a mixture of mysticism, Christianity and the ‘wisdom of the East’, sense and nonsense.
* Aldermen were indirectly elected council members – elected to serve a fixed term by the directly elected element in the council; a highly honoured position which has since been abolished.
* From God Knows, by Minnie Louise Haskins.
Oxford 1943–1947
OXFORD DOES NOT SET OUT TO PLEASE. Freshmen arrive there for the Michaelmas term in the misty gloom of October. Monumental buildings impress initially by their size rather than their exquisite architecture. Everything is cold and strangely forbidding. Or so it seemed to me.
It had been at Somerville during bitterly cold mid-winter days that I had taken my Oxford entrance exams. But I had seen little of my future college before I arrived, rather homesick and apprehensive, to begin my first term. In fact, Somerville always takes people by surprise. Many incurious passers-by barely know it is there, for the kindest thing to say of its external structure is that it is unpretentious. But inside it opens up into a splendid green space onto which many rooms face. I was to live both my first and second years in college, and in due course, a picture or two, a vase and finally an old armchair brought back from Grantham allowed me to feel that the rooms were in some sense mine. In my third and fourth years I shared digs with two friends in Walton Street.
Both Oxford and Somerville were strongly if indirectly affected by the war. For whatever reason, Oxford was not bombed, but like everywhere else, both town and university were subject to the blackout (‘dim-out’ from 1944) and much affected by wartime stringencies. Stained-glass windows were boarded up. Large static water tanks stood ready for use in case of fire. Most of our rations were allocated direct to the college which provided our unexciting fare in hall, though on rare occasions I would be asked out to dinner. There were a few coupons left over for jam and other things. One of the minor benefits to my health and figure of such austerities was that I ceased having sugar in my tea – though only many years later would I deny my ever-sweet tooth the pleasure of sugared coffee (not that there was over-much coffee for some time either). There were tight controls over the use of hot water. For example, there must be no more than five inches of water in the bath and of course I rigidly observed this, though coming from a family where the relationship between cleanliness and Godliness was no laughing matter. Not that we ever felt like complaining. After all, we were the lucky ones.
I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge and I knew that, however undemonstrative they might be, my parents were extremely proud of the fact. Before I went up to Oxford, I had a less clear idea of what the place would be like than did many of my contemporaries. But I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for. So, excellent as it was, particularly in the sciences, I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham, our ‘local’ university. Another aspect of Oxford which appealed to me then – and still does – is the collegiate system. Oxford is divided into colleges, though it also has some central university institutions, such as the Bodleian Library. In my day, life centred on the college (where you ate and slept and received many of your tutorials) and around other institutions – church and societies – which had more or less a life of their own. My experience of college life contributed to my later conviction that if you wish to bring the best out of people they should be encouraged to be part of smaller, human-scale communities rather than be left to drift on a sea of impersonality.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which wartime conditions affected the ‘feel’ of university life was the fact that so many of us were very young – only seventeen or just eighteen. From 1944, the feel of Oxford changed again as older people, invalided out, started coming back from the services either to complete a shortened wartime degree or to begin a full degree course. They had been through so much more than we had. As Kipling wrote (in ‘The Scholars’) of young naval officers returning to Cambridge after the Great War to continue their studies:
Far have they steamed and much have they known, and most would they fain forget;
But now they are come to their joyous own with all the world in their debt.
By the time I left I found myself dealing with friends and colleagues who had seen much more of the world than I had. And I gained a great deal from the fact that Oxford at the end of the war was a place of such mixed views and experience.
I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment. I continued to take long walks on my own, around Christ Church Meadow, through the university parks and along the Cherwell or the Thames, enjoying my own company and thoughts. But I soon started to appreciate Oxford life. I was a member of a Methodist Study Group which gave and attended tea parties. My mother would send me cakes through the post and on a Saturday morning I would join the queue outside the ‘cake factory’ in north Oxford for an hour or so to buy the sustenance for tea that